Things you probably won't want to do: Tunnels under the Thames

Frankly, I could probably entitle the entire blog 'Things you probably won't want to do'.  But that would perhaps be unwelcoming. One is suddenly 'minded of Why Don't You? suggesting you switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead. But! Dear, dear reader, I, rather, propose that you read on, and have your life immeasurably enriched. Quite a proposal.  Quite an inaccurate proposal.

I like to give my otherwise-random cycling efforts some purpose. I try to find places to go to give my life meaning, and thrill my little point-and-click camera. Hence this thematic voyage of discovery.  Tunnels under the Thames that a cyclist may enjoy en bike.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel runs from an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs to the south of Canary Wharf (from which you get a wonderful view of Greenwich Maritime College, alias Les Mis Land), to Greenwich (from which you get a view of an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs, and the towers of Canary Wharf in the haze).

Basically, all of SE London looks like this (cf Thamesmead).

On each side there is a spiral staircase down from the turret / 99-without-a-flake entrance, and a large and oddly wood-paneled lift.  Like a drawing room on a pulley.

The tunnel itself is cool in summer (wonder if it gets cold in winter), and slopes slightly too steeply down, and then back up. It's much like any number of Tube tunnels you've tramped along. Makes me think for some reason of the Bakerloo line. Must be the mud-brown tinge. Despite the signs urging pedestrian pursuits, a collection of idiots is constantly on hand to skate or cycle along the tunnel.  One should try not to hope that they fall over and injure themselves in some sort of facial way.

On the Greenwich side, pause briefly to be annoyed by the post-fire reconstruction of the Golden Hind (or whichever boat it is), now trapped in a wave of geometric Tupperware.

A few miles further east is the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, which is much like the Greenwich one, albeit a bit longer. The lifts are currently broken, so the adventurous cyclist will have to carry his bicycle up all the bloody spiral stairs. There's not much to see back on the north side (well, there's the (free!) Woolwich Ferry, and, mmm, Woolwich), although the wonderfully and slightly-wacky Thames Barrier Gardens are a short cycle west, by Pontoon Dock DLR station.

Fun and daft in roughly equal measure.

Of course, the cyclist is not allowed down the Limehouse Link (and, since it doesn't go under the Thames, the tunnel is beyond the rubric of this blog post), but one can, one speculates, do over 30mph on a bicycle down there, given the steep downramps and hefty tailwinds. One speculates.

A less illegal cycling option is the Rotherhite tunnel, which goes from glamorous Surrey Quays to glamorous Limehouse (home of the aforementioned lovely fun illegal tunnel). It's probably dull to drive along, but it's a good laugh on a bike, despite the general stink of traffic fumes.  I decided to ride on the pavement, rather than risk the narrow road, which is, in hindsight, probably also illegal.

Trusty steed.

Finally, narratorially, there're the Big Daddies of Thames Tunnels, the ones which the East London Line runs through.

Occasionally, they leave the tunnel lights on (above), so you can peer down the tracks and imagine yourself a Victorian gentleman (below), all top hat and searching for a filly of liberal morals unbismerched by the pox.

And then there's the Victoria, Northern and Jubliee Lines (oh, and Bakerloo, forgot that one), each of which delves under the Thames, but none of them permit bikes.  The District Line, at its poncy end, has its own bridges over the river, although some idiot designed the Richmond bridge's sides so high that you can't see the water at all.

I don't know if you can take a bike through the Dartmouth Tunnel, and I'm not going to try.

Pleasant voyages, now-enriched reader!

Leeds: a caffeinated perambulation

Leeds gets coffee - there are some superb coffee shops, where you can get a Square Mile pourover whilst browsing Caffeine and toying with an aeropress.  Really lovely.

Leeds has beer, but doesn't get it - for some reason, craft beers are some kind of alternative (ie gothy, unwashed) experience. Brew Dog had a great range of unique bottled things, but is somehow aimed at punks (really? Is 1977 back in already?). Mr Foley's Cask Ale House has a similarly interesting selection, but the clientèle was decidedly beardy (is trampy back in already?).  The barman in the Brewey Tap was slightly embarrassed by their own micro-brewed pilsner, and was keen that I have an Amstell. Leeds, salute your unique brews! And perhaps market them to a larger, more hygienic demographic. 

The Picture House, incidentally, is really horrible.  You can tell that from the outside, and there's no need to go inside again [note to self].

The friendly / chippy nexus - Northern chums love to extol the uniformly warm-spirited wonders of the Northern soul, while observing that the average Southerner personally gouges the eyes from three kittens a day. Somehow the Northeners' self-proclaimed friendliness is powered by a loathing of the South, and particularly any la-di-dah Southern flâneur poncing about their cities with a Pevsner and an SLR.  

Keen to talk to a stranger, a Yorkshireman seems also keen to proselytise his view of the world.  I (aforementioned ponce, all espadrilles, manbag and words like flâneur) was advised in stern terms at no fewer than three separate establishments that I should not contemplate having milk in my filter coffee. Listen chaps, thanks for the recap of what you learned in barista school, but if I wish to adulterate my beverage (perhaps chilling a Beaujolais, or popping a Gewürztraminer next to the radiator for ten minutes before serving), I really should be allowed to. Perhaps I know what I'm doing, or at very least I know what I like.  

Got there in the end.

The shopping - In terms of presentation, the insanely handsome Arcades, the gleeful pomp of Corn Exchange (what a roof!), knock almost anywhere else into a cocked hat. Well done.  There is sadly no John Lewis, but there is the mother of all Marks and Sparks in the covered market, which makes up for it.

Lots and lots of this, plz.

Take note of how to do a roof properly, Leeds train station.

There's no-one in the Merrion Centre, and no reason to go there, but it's a fun romp in minty green and chromed metal.

It's probably illegal to say that The Light is a bit dull, but it's essentially just the Aspiration Village from Hammersmith's Westfield.  Yawn.  Trinity Leeds is likewise a copy-and-paste chunk of the same Westfield, although curiously open the the elements (thereby ignoring the wisdom of the Victorians who built the Arcades to keep out the Yorkshire sleet).  The unloved 80s Core is basically empty, although it does have some hoardings with fun CGI mock-ups including such copyright-safe stores as Hardy Ramsden's, Caffe Zero and Benny and Frankie's.  

The accent - the women all have the prophylactic vowels of Janice Battersby*. A horrible erection-defeating noise </misogyny>.  (*Yes, technically her accent is NW England, not NE, but there is no-one famous from Leeds, so it's impossible to cite an appropriate cultural reference).

The Universities - Chamberlain, Bon and Powell's Brutliast campus is wonderful. Its concrete is at once a superbly preserved piece of space-age past and yet still sci-fi futuristic. The smooth clean finish seems more accessible than the Barbican's bush-hammered concrete. Accessible visually, at least; it's still possible to be three feet horizontally and fifty feet vertically from where you want to be, with no idea how to get from one place to the other.

Still, the flying walkways are executed with such panache that they really make the UEA's skyways look like work of an upstart bumpkin in comparison (sorry, Denys).  

Viewed through the porthole of a passing Imperial cruiser.

The nearby Met Uni accommodation tower, pre-rusted and weathering beautifully, is a lovely exercise in Coreten steel too.  Easily the best new tower in Leeds.

The train station of three halves - there's a rubbish late-60s airless box (compare with, say, the spacious, light-filled and contemporary station in Barking), a dirt-grey millennial thing with the roof of a B&Q warehouse, and yet also a magnificently-restored Art Deco hall on the side. It's pleasingly surreal to see a Moderne McDonald's (even if the font isn't quite Gill Sans).  

Beneath the station, the River Aire sloshes through a series of Victorian channels, the Dark Arches.  Fun for imagining you're on the way to a gin palace and about to be slain by Jack the Ripper.

Where's the grass? - Leeds appears to be home to about ten square feet of greenery, in Park Square.  Millennium Square is shaded green on the (rather helpful) street-side information maps, but is actually a gentle paved slope forming an informal rake of seats facing the jumbo TV mounted on the wall of the Carriage Works theatre.  Other than that, it's all buildings and tarmac.

Where's the rest? - there's a curious feeling that Leeds is only half there. The railway and river Aire cuts east-west, and the bypass describes a semi-circle to the north of that. But there's nothing much south of the river. Just some 'stunning-development' guff like Bridgewater Place (the 'Dalek' - a dire stab at being iconic; one imagines the name came first and the architect then came up with something to fit), and a (ho ho!) leaning-tower-of-Leeds effect made through fenestration.  And you thought English Post-Modernism died in 1989.  

Rubbish.

I am too annoyed with the joke to be able to like this.

Speaking of PoMo - Whilst I like PoMo as much as (realistically, more than) the next man, I really think that the worst possible place for playful architecture is somewhere from which you might get sent to prison.  Shame on you, Leeds Magistrates' Court, which has been made out of wooden blocks and coloured in by a child.  

What larks!  Only a PoMo morgue would be less tasteful.

Leeds would be a strong card in the pack of British Cities Top Trumps. It's one of the largest city in the UK (Bigness: 3) and had the good fortune to be spared the wrath of Luftwaffe bombs (Impervious to Nazis: 98).  It therefore got to decide what to do with its building stock, and it thankfully chose to retain a wonderful selection of Victorian civic buildings, mills and shopping streets (Proud heritage: 90).  The Arcades are glorious (Posh shopping: 88), and the University is architecturally world-class (Brutalism FTW: 92)

It inevitably feels so very much smaller than Birmingham, Manchester or London, each of which is bulging at the seams in comparison.  But, of course, Leeds can be smaller without becoming overcrowded, because of all those Northeners in London banging on about how much better things are back in Yorkshire.

Photoshopping Battersea Power Station

The above is a cameraphone snap (from the Building Centre) of a model of Nicholas Grimshaw's new London Bridge station.  Here, even the shiny-shiny Shard becomes neutrally white, a backdrop to the glinting silver concourse canopies.  And the Shard is there to suggest certain values (modernity, commerce, soi-disant iconism) that the model wishes to appropriate for the station.  The Shard also helps the viewer locate London Bridge within London (which is interestingly the inverse of how the Tube map operates).  The whole model is resolutely dirt-free (even those troublesome trains), pristine and futuristic. Note also that the station itself is shown as snaking along smooth curve of wood.  It has become a giant Brio set.  Simple, clean, wholesome.  Single-Varietal London Organic Bridge Station.

Photoshop'd shots of buildings are the scale model of the twentieth century.

Shame it's the twenty-first century.

A few propaganda Photoshops of the soon-to-be-immured-with-flats Battersea Power Station have emerged.

Reading this image similarly, distance in London is collapsed until the Battersea flats appear moments from the Eye, and but a gentle curve onwards to the Shard.  The bottom quarter or so is verdant parkland.  There're no people from this perspective. There's hardly a vehicle to be seen (perhaps a few toy-like London buses on Chelsea Bridge), and certainly no trains whatsoever rumbling their way within metres of those shiny glass curtain walls.  Whereas most of London is under a somewhat grey and troubled sky, blesséd Battersea sits is a pool of golden sun.

Separately, those new flats look just like what the Doozers were building in Fraggle Rock.

A further shot is awash with happier, more productive Photoshop People busily having a simply super time in the little riverside park on the north side of the Power Station.

Zooming in reveals the sort-of charming clumsiness in the image manipulation, a dollop of glue on an architectural model.

Everyone's a bit ugly, and, more menacingly, no-one is old.  Apparently the future will be like a scene from Logan's Run.

Can't wait.  And helpfully, we don't have to.  One can apparently access a Pop Up Park in the grounds of the Power Station this summer.

Stupid name.  Single-Varietal Pop Up Organic Park is much better.

Childhood memories

I have a number of memories from my early childhood that didn't happen.

One Christmas Eve, I remember waking to hear Father Christmas banging around downstairs in the darkness.  I sleepily thought that I mustn't disturb him, or he wouldn't leave us any presents.  One holiday on a south-coast beach, I remember being knocked over by a boy-height wave and taking a in deep breath whilst swirling underwater.  Both I suppose are some nexus of wishful thinking and sensory confusion.  And yet, I can remember them.  They are empirically real, even if factually imagined.

More frustratingly, I have an elusive memory of the stalls of a market, a typical veg-and-tat market, in the gloom.   I have it in my mind that the market was underneath a multistorey carpark.  A massive concrete carpark.  And  I can quite clearly recall being bought a hotdog from a stall at this market.  The hotdog had fried onions.  I didn't want onion on my hotdog.  Perhaps that's why the memory is so clear.  Or perhaps this is the instant I discovered I don't like fried onions.

Most frustratingly, despite this wealth of sensory recollection, this memory has spent years floating without any place or date to pin it to.   Rough calculations suggest it must've come from somewhere east of Saltash and someplace south of Birmingham, and sometime between 1983 and 1988.  But that is hundreds of square miles, and a billion instants.

I do not understand why this particular memory has stayed with me, and why the lack of place has so itched within my mind.

My mother thought it might be Basildon.  And so I went to check.  It is not.  Non-one else could think of where this market underneath a multistorey carpark might be.  Perhaps I was misremembering.  And who would put a market there, rather than more cars?  Perhaps it never happened.

And yesterday, I don't know why, I remembered.  As mental image of the market again floated across my mind, some part of my memory, silent for years, answered.  Plymouth?  No...Portsmouth.

After 15 seconds of Googling, I had my answer.  It was the Tricorn Centre.

This picture, grainy and hard to make out, is quite eerily close to my memory.

Parental enquiries about Portsmouth lead to a mid-80s trip to the maritime museum there.  I recall nothing of the submarine we apparently went in, but some echo of disappointment with the lack of beach at this particular seaside.  And, it would appear, we went to the Tricorn centre.

Not that I can now go back.  It was demolished in 2004.  It was knocked down to make way for a new shopping development.  Although, nine years later, the site is still a pay and display car park.

I shall not claim for an instant that this childhood trip instilled a lifelong love of Brutalism.  Indeed, although I can appreciate the South Bank complex, and can even be amused by its harsh crystalline jaggedness, I can not quite bring myself to like it.

I shall not claim that in its later years the Tricorn centre was a pleasant place to be.  I do not know; I doubt it.

But I shall never see the Firestone Building.  I shall never see the Euston Arch.  I shall never see the Tricorn Centre with adult eyes.

Coventry: a perambulation

Coventry's 'Medieval Spon Street' is - how can I put this? - shit.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

In between the rail station (a rather successful budget Euston) and the City Centre, the pedestrian is encouraged to play with the traffic.  Unusually, this takes the form of vertical weaving - a bridge across a dual carriageway, then a route under a flyover - rather than horizontal car-dodging that one might expect.

Over...

...and under.

I can only assume there was some pride in the deliberate involvement of the pedestrian with the applied concrete and rapid-transit possibilities of the ring road.  O gleaming post-War ideas, now long-since tarnished!

The reconstructed City is arranged with the spire of the old Cathedral at one end of a major axis, and, erm, an office block at the other.  The shops are arranged around a number of large, pleasant Fifties squares.  And, as ever, subsequent planners and regenerators have a loathing for such open public spaces, and so have adulterated the original spaces in increasingly inventive ways.  One has access to a first-storey walkway by means of a gobsmackingly out-of-scale brick ramp.

Ascending, visually anyway, up to that office block.

Another square has been broken up by trees in not-quite-enclosures (why?) and gifted with a pointlessly large minty-glass escalator box, again affording access to the nothing-much one storey up.

A third one has been fully roofed-over, seeking to pretend it's something tasteful and white, like Welwyn's tastelessly bland Howard Centre.

But even the caffeinated mediocrity of Caffé Nerd cannot hide the enjoyable wackiness of the Round Cafe, which suggests that you'd find tree rings if you cut a slice from the BT Tower.  I am genuinely disappointed not to have been here when it housed a Wimpy.  There is no toilet, the internet informs me.

Beyond that, is the concrete saucer of the covered market, which inventively uses its own roof as a car park.

I never feel comfortable in markets.  They're either the bruised-apple-and-mulitpack-socks places, where I feel like a glowing beacon of overprivilege who should rightly be lynched, or those loathsome 'Farmers' Markets' where I feel like I've stumbled into some freakish cult that worships quiche and believes that the word 'organic' can absolve all manner of saturated fat-related sins.  Shudder.  Still, the building is quite cool - and not a cupcake in sight.

There's something very camp going on with the public art in Coventry, too.  At the Bull Yard (not, of course, to be confused with Birmingham's Bullring, which is, literally, several miles away), there is a representation of Freddie Mercury, holding a 99 Flake, dancing with a drunk bull.  Whilst a miniature Milady from Dogtanian floats in the air.  What did the scroll once say?  'Smurf pilchard dah-doo' would be fitting.

There's also a sculpture of the T-1000 as John Connor's foster mum from Terminator 2.  I appreciate this, as I'm a big fan of James Cameron too.

Behind which is a building with some beautiful concrete so deeply and richly moulded that the only sensical use is not as the city tourist information or an art gallery, but a fried chicken shop.

Also, SRSLY U GUYS, what the hell happened here?

As steps already operate in three dimensions, I can only sum this up-and-back-and-sidewards-and-back-whilst-sloping arrangement as four-dimensional (with the concatening headache and ankle-hurt that concept evokes).

Finally, there is the Coventry's Carry On smut, in the form of the Lady Godiva myth, and her accompanying perv, Peeping Tom.  Here he is, forever caught at the moment of, um, distraction.

All this leads (narratorially, if not geographically) to Medieval Spon Street.  I was perhaps unfair to smear it so summarily with shit.  There is the Blue Bistro, which does a lovely burger, and a pleasantly low-ceiling'd Old Windmill pub, which also does a lovely burger, brought in by the nice man from the Blue Bistro next door.  But, apart from that, there is the disappointing reality of a cheapo grubby pub and ye kebabe shoppe.  

And, erm, a Laser Quest.  The surreality is compounded by an Ikea photobombing the whole thing.

OH HAI!!1

The aforementioned ringroad and other post-war transport infrastructure also necessitates some interesting tarmac-spanning buildings.  Firstly, there's a knock-off version of James Stirling's Florey building, fitted with a magnificent proboscis, doing an impression of Henry the Hoover.

The remarkable bulk of the Brutalist Britannia Hotel straddles the road, with all the grace of an obese chip-scoffer in stilettos, resting her arse on the (daft mock-Grecian) bus station to the right.

But by miles the best is the sports centre, an astonishing metal-clad multi-faceted alien mothership, with a smoked-glass bridge snaking off to suck up unsuspecting humans.  Lovely stuff.

No trip to Coventry would be complete without a visit to Basil Spence's post-war cathedral.  Except it now costs £8, so you may prefer to have four pints for the same price in the nearby (mock-30s-mock-Tudor) Wetherspoons.  Should you head inside, you get to:

1)  See the great stained glass

2)  See some creepy angels

3)  Not have to see the strangely weak porch thing over the South Entrance, which feels like a plywood extension tacked onto the side of the pink-stone solidity of the main nave.

I shall leave you with a picture of that neo-Classical fibreglass bus station, modelled on the one in Athens built by Zeus in 1989.  'Till next time.